The piercing of ears has been accomplished, in the past, with a type of stud gun, as more fully disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4, 527,563 issued July 9, 1985. This type of gun can be readily used to pierce ears and simultaneously mount a stud within the hole pierced through the ear and engage a clasp on the portion of the stud extending through the ear.
Most ear piercing is done on the premises of stores which sell earrings for pierced ears. It is critical that a system of ear piercing be sanitary, easy to use, and acceptable in appearance. This is of great importance since the person piercing the ear with a stud gun usually has little or no training in the art of ear piercing. Often times the piercing of ears is done by the salesclerk who also sells the earrings. As disclosed in the above-identified patent, there are many more reasons for having a system of ear piercing which is simple to operate.
However, the system disclosed in the above-identified patent, while of wide spread use, offers some difficulty in its use. In particular, and as shown in FIGS. 1 and 2, a number of pieces must be assembled onto the barrel of the stud gun in addition to the earring stud and clasp to be placed into the purchaser's ear and the clasp to be positioned onto the stud. These individual pieces are a stud holder to hold the stud of the earring, an alignment member to direct the movement of the stud holder and a clasp carrying member to hold the clasp next to the ear while the stud is driven through the ear and into the clasp.
These three components must be assembled before ear piercing can take place. The components are positioned at different places located along the barrel of the stud gun. The positioning of these pieces is critical to the proper operation, and ultimate customer satisfaction, of the ear piercing process.
Because of the number of components and critical nature of positioning those components upon the stud gun, some training on the use of the stud gun is required. Additionally, the possibility of a salesclerk not properly assembling the components upon the stud gun before the ear piercing, can have detrimental consequences for the person having his or her ear pierced. Therefore, there is great interest in the ear piercing industry to develop and sell an improvement to the use of these components in the piercing of ears. The improvement makes the overall ear piercing method easier, faster and with better results while reducing the complexity and criticality of positioning the components. Finally, the improvement makes it easier to manufacture and more economical than the present combination of components.
The features identified above as being desired for assisting in the piercing of ears using a stud gun as mentioned above, are all provided by the present invention.